The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1148: Neighbors Helping Neighbors in North Carolina w/ Danny and Wilson

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

51 MinutesPG-13Since day one, Danny and Wilson have been on the ground assisting with relief and recovery efforts in response to Hurricane Helene's devastation. They discuss what they've observed and what they're doing with Pete.Pete's Substack with how you can helpPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Liddle, more to value. Great to see you back at Spex Savers. Okay, could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals. Oh, right, yes.

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Beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. All right, everyone. I'm here with Danny. Danny. Hey, what's going on, man? How are you? Hey, I'm doing good, brother. I appreciate you having us on. Yeah, no problem. Who else is there with me with you? Yeah, I'm Wilson The swift guy that you got the boat for there Yeah, he's one of our Swift Water Rescue River Guides Yeah, we really appreciate that boat

That is, what I have been using, I did pull out of the trash Yeah, their gear and all their rafts got swept out in the flood They were, yep, slam hammered pretty hard where they were at in Tennessee so they actually pulled a raft out of the trash to go rescue people off their rooftops. Man, you know, you think if we were under a different government, if we were ruled by people who were like your neighbors, this would get taken care of, you'd have, they'd be out there helping you and at least providing you with the best possible things.

And like we were saying before we started recording, and it's just neighbors taking care of neighbors at this point. Yeah, well, that's what it's been from the start because, I don't do that. It was just me and a group of my friends going to EOC and getting work. You know, it was no thought of getting this or that. It was just go do work. It was right thing to do it.

Well, let me ask you a lot of that going on. Yeah, I know when this started, the living were obviously going to do it. to be the first priority. And now, as I understand it, you're at the recovery stage. How's that going? Well, you know, he was here at the day of the flood. You know, in Tennessee, doing the rescue side, right there with the USAR teams. I got here just after the flood, kind of just doing my own thing.

Cowboy ended up, basically. and then assisted some guys from Fairview Fire and got roped in as a volunteer alongside the U-S.S.R. teams here in West North Carolina. And that switched over to recovery pretty quick. Probably about the end of the first week, beginning of the second week, went into recovery. And it's been that ever since. And then the EOC's Emergency Operations Centers got stood down on the search by the governor here in Western North Carolina. So then after that point, the entire responsibility of the search fell onto the family's shoulders with no resources. So that's when Wilson and myself and rain and all these guys here with me, the whole team, all came together to coordinate and provide resources on the search center on a purely volunteer basis because there was no county resources, no public safety.

National Guard here in North Carolina wanted to help us. So did the 101st Airborne. but the governor here had stood down all emergency management in western North Carolina on search, so they weren't allowed to help. Before we go any further, can I ask in your day jobs what you guys do, if you're okay with that? He's a river guy. He pretty much does the same thing that he's been doing right now for a living. It's just a few less dead bodies.

Myself, I did the Sear Instructing thing for a while after they got to be a birthday. Marine Corps. And right now, apparently, I'm just doing disaster response full time because we've been here for what, what is it, 12 weeks straight? Yeah. All the days are blending together. I'm not even sure how long we've been here, but yeah, we have a coalition of sorts. It's called the coalition project of organizations have kind of formed around us, seeing what we've been doing. And they all came together. They liked our ethos. You know, every time InfoWars or somebody who would come out here and interview me, they'd always ask what organization I'm with. And I'd always say, you know, I'm just a guy. And that whole saying is caught on. You know, there's people doing apparel lines about it now because we don't have egos. You know, I shoved mine to the bottom of a whiskey bottle 12 weeks ago and it stayed there.

Yep. Everything that we saw in the first days here, that'll humble the fuck out of you. And we don't have room for egos out there, especially when you're, when you're, when, you're, you're out there looking for someone's relative, you know, it's all about a sacred duty. Bring them closure. There's no room for egos. Yeah, you know, we just keep saying doing the right thing. Yeah, every time. When Wilson talks, make sure he has, he's close to the mic because I'm having trouble

hearing him and we want people hear him. Yeah, scoot in, really. Yeah, we're having to share a mic off of my laptop that's been covered in a silt from being out there in the debris piles. So excuse our setup here being a little bit redneck Yeah, the big thing out here is We depend on each other in every way imaginable You know, when I'm in a raft

I depend on Rain and Wilson and keep me alive They're in charge the moment we get in the raft Until we get out So it's really tight-knit. We live together, we work together We depend on each other And every time that we don't have canines to go out there and search We just ask ourselves What's the most important thing that we can do for the people

here you know what's the next right thing to do so getting people in the hot tents so they don't freeze to death working to try and do rebuilds get them supplies we're kind of like triage you know whatever the most important need is to keep people alive and to bring them home is what we do and then we'll hand them off to another organization to a higher level of care get them into a camper or a tiny home is you wouldn't believe how many people are displaced out here it's well-a-well over 10,000.

It's an insane number. If you count all the folks in all the affected counties in Western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, just on our end, we've probably put about 70 families in the hot tents out here just to keep them from freezing today. Describe the first, the first days. Describe the storm and everything. And if you've never been in a flood, you don't know what water can do. So can you describe that? I can describe them in pretty good detail.

Can you hear me good? Just want to make sure. Yeah, come in a little closer if you can. Yeah, so I woke up on the 27th to some of my friends actually called me to ask if I was all right, because the road behind my house is gone. A bunch of those houses there, they got fully flooded out, destroyed. And just down the road, down the mountain for me, the end of my road. there was a small community called Denton, and they got hit hard.

Like, I live right on the Pigeon River. I say Hartford, Harper, Tennessee, Newport, Tennessee, all that. And so my friends were calling me to see if I was all right. Like, well, yeah, I'm fine. Why, what's going on? I had no idea that had gotten that bad that fast. But overnight, the thought had built to the point where,

well, we started seeing the destruction that we see now. It was starting to get to that point. In Hartford, I know on the Pigeon River, we were probably looking about somewhere close to 140,000 cubic feet of water per second. To give you some perspective, one cubic foot of water weighs 67 pounds, and it's about the size of a basketball. So 140,000 67 pound basketballs. And that water is going to take everything that's in there and shut it wherever it wants. Okay, it's not that the water is pushing, it's what the water is pushing, because it already has the force momentum. So what it does, it strips entire islands, mountains,

mountainsides, whatever it wants, it takes. So you get an idea that there in Harper in my town, I was watching entire giant trees, root ball and all, that have been stripped of all the limbs off of them. And we're getting tossed into the side of the bridge or tossed over the bridge. Yeah, that kind of force is not to be messed with. It's definitely something that as soon as got a hold of you,

going to take you. And the last call that I did there on the 27th was my actual, that little town in Denton, that little community. We could not get in there. I mean, no, water that was coming through and had just eaten at the entire mountain sides. And, you know, there's objects in the water, all that kind of stuff. We're in the dark. We can't see. We got like half the flashlight and the trash raft. You know, so we really risked on that one. But, Again, it goes back to doing the right thing. Yeah, you're going to have to take a risk if you have the ability.

You know, if you have the ability to do something and then you don't, well, that's on you. You know, I can't imagine having to live with myself, wake up in the morning knowing that I could have done something better, could have done something more. So that's why, you know, like he said, on days that we aren't actually out there looking for people, we're out here putting people in tents. Yeah, the first. Days in when they had about week after the flood in areas like Swaranoa, Fairview, Batcave was, I don't think they've invented words for it yet, to be honest. People walking around just in a complete days down the middle of the road, because there's houses in the middle of the road in some places still,

40, 50 foot high debris piles in the middle of town. Like Swaranoa, we called it zombie land because it just looked. like a nuke had gone off and everyone wandered around like a zombie. People were having to get cut out for about two weeks out of their homes or to get access to their homes to get them out. Fairview Fire Department, you know, and a bunch of guys were out there and volunteers helping cut that cave fire department out, you know, meeting in the middle so they'd come up with four-wheelers and get supplies and evacuate people out. areas like that, like Chimney Rock and Batcave, all the roads in were gone. So you had to hike in for miles to get anywhere to get people's supplies or to get them out. The few people that were able hiked out of their towns because there was nothing left,

chimney rocks at the bottom of Lake Lournow. Communities like Pensacola, Minneapolis, it is kind of a running joke up here. All these haulers are named after some big city. those are little holler communities outside burnsville they got hammered really hard all the roads were gone covering boulders you couldn't get in there even with four-wheeler so you either had to hike in or they had to fly in with helicopters to get people out and get them food and water it was intense and we had martial law here for weeks i want to say it was well over a month after the event we still had martial law because all the looting i never myself saw the looting and

until more recently, early on, we were too busy running around trying to help people. We heard about it all the time. People would walk around with guns. Mostly out-of-staters who come in here look like they're invading Iraq with plate cares and long rifles. And we tried to stay low pro, you know, Massey Oak hoodie, concealed carry. Tried to look like we're here to help instead of here to be G.I. Joe, invade.

Because a lot of it here in the early days, it was winning hearts and minds. you know, we're not from here. We're a guest in someone else's backyard. So there was no power, there's no water, there's no cell phone service. So we would get out far enough to get service on our phones. And we'd find someone in one of the local groups on Facebook that had a relative that they needed help. And we'd talk to them and then we'd screenshot the conversation. We'd sneak past the checkpoints that the locals had set up to keep everyone out.

And then we'd find that person, show them the screenshot, because there's no phone service, get them some food and water and supplies, maybe a generator, and then have them vouch for the rest of the community. You know, we were there to help and not there to loot, that we weren't with FEMA, you know, the feds, because a lot of the locals in the smaller communities would set up these little checkpoints. The media called them militias, but it's not actually true. It was just locals that had hay bale checkpoints set up in what was left in the roads, that had big plywood signs that said locals only or emergency personnel, everyone else keep out.

And they meant the National Guard, too. They didn't want the National Guard in there. Some of them were concerned that FEMA and the Army was going to come in and do things they didn't want to do, so they just kept everyone out. So we would either dare them to shoot us and just drive through or we would hike around them, sneak around them and get in there. So it was the Wild West for weeks. Yeah.

We're still getting used to using stoplights and traffic laws and all that stuff. It's weird. Yeah. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast.

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Great to see you back at Spex Savers. Okay. Could you read out the letters on the wall for me? Yep. D-E-A-L-S? Yeah, D-E-A-L-S. Deals. Oh, right.

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Ask in store for details. I mean, basically all infrastructure was wiped out, right? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It's all gone. It's still coming back. You know, there's plenty areas without sole service still, some areas without power.

A lot of areas, they aren't going to have potable water for a long time. There's still haven't used bald water. We joked about the folks that came in from out of state a little bit light with all the water. We called them water goblins. They show up with water and there's already mountains of it here. So there was nowhere that wanted it. So they would just go to a random house,

drop it on the doorstep, take a picture for Instagram and then leave. And we made jokes about that for a long time. But it's going to be a need again in their future because they're having to use it to brush their teeth. They're having to use to wash their dishes. They're having to use it for everything. You know, we go through gallons of water a day with coffee.

So you imagine what that's going to look like Two, three, four months down the road from now Those mountains of water are going to get small really quick So all of the infrastructure was completely gone You didn't even have public safety Being able to talk to their sister departments In the next town in the initial days and first week It was all damn radio stuff

Balfangs, yeah Everyone had a Balfing Little Taliban radio to talk to each other Sheriff's Department would have trouble talking to emergency management at times. Nobody was talking to each other. We actually, part of our job is going out there, recon, and getting the volunteer fire departments linked up with the emergency operations centers so everyone can start coordinating.

And now it's come back a lot in the last 12 weeks, but it's actually kind of spooky how much it hasn't. I'm used to the Gulf Coast. if an entire city gets wiped off the map the very next day, Waffle House is going to be open with a generator. Out here, I think the nearest Waffle House that we could actually go into was in Marion. And it's still just really

fucked. For lack of better words, it's just absolutely a mess out here still. Like two little bottles of bed and then I have knees in the water here. We had what we called beer water for a long time that's finally going away. It's Anheuser-Busch sink cans of water and beer cans. And you'll still see those floating around in restaurants and stuff every once in a while. Yeah, I think I have some in the truck. Yeah.

It tastes got awful as they got chalking it. I had heard that water treatment plants, like I guess the main water treatment plant for Asheville, you know, big city like that was just, they're just washing down. down the river. Oh, yeah, the North Fork is just gone. They're going to have to completely rebuild it. Swaranoa and Black Mountain, I think, finally got drinkable water. I want to say a week ago, if I'm a little bit off on my time frames,

we haven't gone home or really taking time off, so everything is kind of blending together. Our memory is a little bit fragmented it at times. You'll have to forgive me if I get a fact wrong of when something changed, the locals, you know, will probably be listening to this and be like, we've had water for a week and a half, not a week, but it 12 weeks out, you know, they finally got drinkable water maybe two weeks ago. They're going to have to rebuild entire treatment facilities, flush up the sewers and everything,

and there's been so many possible contaminants in all the groundwater and everywhere else that they've been having a test. We have no idea. Everything's a rumor out here. People are still kind of in an information vacuum here because a lot of folks are so focused on survival mode. They don't have time to find out what's going on in the news. Like, I don't have any idea what's going on the outside world.

I know if Trump won the election, I guess. Something to do with Syria. But we don't really know what's going on out there. We never have time. And we have to get somewhere where there's internet. usually we're too busy working, but the locals, a lot of them are the same boat, especially in the more rural areas outside of Asheville. So it's, life is different here.

It's kind of surreal when we go far enough out to buy supplies somewhere, like Hickory or Winston-Salem where things are normal, and they think everything's fine here. Let's talk about this. You mentioned, like, tents that you can set up heaters for people, And you also mentioned like 10,000 displaced people. I mean, what's happening to them? I don't know the exact number.

So, you know, it's just ballpark for any of the armchair quarterbacks out there. Just the sheer volume of people that other organizations are having to house that we've had to house with temporary shelters. between East Tennessee and West North Carolina. Yeah, I would say that's still in my own backyard, like I said. We got hit pretty good. We didn't get hit like these guys got hit. But it took, what, about four weeks for us to get

supposedly drinkable water, but it still wasn't right. It wasn't right for weeks and weeks after. A number of affected people, definitely, that's a reasonable assumption to make right on there. It's definitely in the thousands. You know, maybe, I'm, I'm guessing it's somewhere between 5 and 17,000 people displaced. FEMA put some of them up in hotels with vouchers.

Yeah, for a while. A lot of organizations have been getting them into campers. United Cajun Navy partnered with us has been helping us get some of the folks we put in a hot tents into campers and we're trying to winterize them. The hot tents is something that a couple locals, friends of mine, cooked up out here. These two ladies were looking at long-term. winter shelter that would be quick and affordable. And they talked to a guy from Norway,

and he came with this idea for the hot tents, the yurts. So it's a large bell tent. You can fit probably four to six people in it. And it's got a little hot stove. It's built to have a hot stove in it. And it gets real toasty. Even when you get into these lower temperatures and the higher elevations in the mountains,

it'll keep you warm. So as a quick fix, is this sort of band-aid until we can get them into something a little more durable and stable. It's great. They're not cheap. They're like $1,200. But they work. And these two ladies,

I think it was Brooke Sullivan and Christina Gray. They came up with the idea, raised a little bit of funding for it, and then the Red Cross copied their homework, got either donated or bought the whole supply, pretty much, and then hoarded it and added all these stipulations to it. You know, they were telling,

us when we started running low on them, we were trying to get them from Red Cross. And they said, well, don't worry, we have 5,000 we can give to you. And we have more than enough. Next thing, I knew it was 7, then it was 5, then it was 2, then it took four days to get one. And then they said, well, if they were homeless before the flood, we're not going to give them a hot tent. Or if it's a single individual male, we're not going to give them a hot tent. So essentially, we had a conversation with a guy from Red Cross that I literally said. So what you're telling me is, if a guy's not married her with a woman or he was homeless before the flood, you're going to let him freeze to death. And they wouldn't answer me because it was in a public setting, but they wouldn't say no.

This is pretty much a confirmation there. So we just started kind of using whatever loopholes we could to get hot tents from them. And then we started doing a go-fundies and raising funds however we could and getting tents donated to us. So one of the side gigs that we do between going out there doing searches is doing recon, finding out where everyone is that needs a hot tent so they don't freeze to death and then going out there and setting it up for them. And then we circle back, bring them firewood, and reach out to the partner organizations to get them into a camper as fast as we can. I know we've put probably 80 families into hot tents so far. And then we're like an eight-man crew, you know. We're a little humble organization.

We're not some big NGO or like the Red Cross. So the eight of us have gone out of there and put 80 families at least into hot tents. And I think we have a waiting list of at least 20 more. I put a post about doing the hot tents out and it went viral. So I'm having to go through like 5,000 message requests on Facebook to try to filter them all out and see who still needs one. It's become like a second full-time job. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design.

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subject to lending. criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs.

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freezing to death in the first week out in Spruce Pine. They didn't have sleeping bags. They didn't have coats. They didn't have anything. And we didn't have cell phone service. So I was the one Gringo that could speak decent of Spanish and they were terrified they were going to get deported because

ICE was out there helping with the search and rescue and everyone in the outside just saw ice there in the ATF so they made a bunch of assumptions but the 14 illegals that I came across they were more afraid of getting deported than they were

freezing of death so that was a complicated situation trying to figure out how to save them because the few personal items they had left you know all of their homes have been swept out. They'd been looted twice. Every time they'd go to take a leak in the woods or go find water, they'd get looted by

their neighbors. So they refused to leave without their stuff. So we had to find a trailer for their stuff and get them into a place. With FEMA, it's been interesting, and we have to work with them. So it's kind of hard. We have to watch a little bit of what we say, because we work with emergency management on the searches. I do know they haven't been out to a lot of the worst hit places yet to assess the damage. A lot of the locals have brought that up.

You know, people where they're in an area where out of 20 houses maybe seven or eight or left, and FEMA hasn't made it out there yet to assess the damage so that they can get the process started. We did meet with a guy from emergency management to part of FEMA up in Tennessee today about search related. activity and he was actually awesome. He's the one guy with FEMA that I have respect for. He's just a good old boy, you know, former firefighter. And he looked at me and he said, I don't care if these people are missing from North Carolina. I don't care about imaginary lines between us. There are people. We're going to bring them all home. What can I do to help? And we told him, myself and the family member, and every single thing we asked for, he immediately took care of it. And he just got to

business. You know, what can we do to help? How can I help the family? What do they need? He was outstanding. But that is a rare, okay, you know, he's an outlier. So I don't want to say they're not doing anything because I have seen FEMA do some good stuff out here. But there is almost a sense that they are in some ways afraid of the locals to the point where they don't want to go into the more rural community. He's like haulers and stuff. I did watch Bob the Constable up in Poggy Road almost arrest some lady from FEMA that was pretty entertaining.

So I mean, like I've seen them do some good for the people, but a lot of it's fallen short, and these people didn't have insurance that would cover flood damage. So a lot of them are getting that $750, which they get taxed on, by the way. They're getting that $750 check from FEMA,

and it's just piss them off more. Yeah, I mean, that all you have to do is, if you were watching the news before this happened, and you're being handed a $750 check while, you know, Haitians in Springfield, Ohio have, you know, reportedly like $25,000 on their EBT cards. Yeah.

I mean... Oh, yeah. The locals have had these conversations with us, you know? And they all, they're pretty upset about it. You know, it's mainly a very red state outside of little hot spots like Asheville and Raleigh that are blue. So these people, they knew all about that. And they've been bringing that up repeatedly to local officials and the Senate.

And the governor, very few people here have a good opinion on the governor. But a lot of them have this opinion that Trump and J.D. Vance are going to save them come January. And I, you know, I'm not here to argue or judge or tell them what to believe. So I just kind of nod my head But They already won the presidency And the vice presidency They could start turning all their donors

Towards this place They could start doing something now They don't need to wait To assume office Before they have the power To do something about this You know, they can come out here And shake hands and glad hand all day

But that isn't Build anyone's house back That doesn't keep someone from freezing to death So I hope that they're right. I would hate to be proven right in this case. I want to be proven wrong. I hope that J.D. Vance and Trump do poor money and resources and manpower

in this place come January. But I'm not going to hold my breath. I'll stay out here and Wilson and I and the guys and Mel and everyone will do it ourselves. You know, our motto for weeks out here has been nobody's coming and it's up to us. And we're not going to change that SOP anytime soon.

because I just don't see a politician coming out here and fixing this place. I think either the people here are going to do it for themselves or the people that have come here for the right reasons are going to help them do it. I don't think Trump and J.D. Vance are going to come back here and turn this place around. I just don't see it happening. Well, I think the point you made was these are people who, these are two guys who, you know, no billionaires. I mean, you know, Trump's a billionaire, but they know billionaires.

This could have been taken care of the water treatment plant could have already been rebuilt. I mean, these are things that could have been done. Elon Musk has done a lot more for us than Trump and JD Vance. You know, I'm not like a fanboy of Elon, but those Starlings have been a lifesaver out here. I mean, besides that, billionaires don't become billionaires because they like giving money. So. Yeah, we're not going to. come up on a Wilson doesn't come on money on it yeah well Wilson come up on the on the microphone because I want to ask you this question and I want you to answer this since you know this is your business you know river river recovery things like that in your just in the area you're working in how many people are missing and presumed deceased it's really difficult to get that kind of accurate thing but

I would say what, as many as 800 as a very high end? I don't know. He has more information on that. I get to work. Okay. Adjacent to the EOC in the early days and worked, you know, alongside the USAR guys. I know that in the area that we're searching, there are at least five. We're looking for three.

I know that what the official figures are for the area is about 200. Based on the illegals and the AT hikers and the homeless encampments, I would say probably altogether, 4 to 600. It's not going to be a thousand or more because the math wouldn't work out. If it was that many, we would have personally been stumbling across more people that are out there that aren't being looked for. Just plugging in the math of how we do this job and the sheer number of miles that we've combed of riverbanks along the elk, along the toe, the cane, the nolichucky, the pigeon, you know, we would have found someone by now that wasn't listed missing if there was some huge figure. So there's a lot of misinformation from both sides, the liberal side and some of the local officials out here. downplay it because they want it to seem like everything is under control.

And then on the other side of the spectrum, there's these crazy conspiracies. One of them, they got started this kind of interesting. So FEMA sent 10,000 body bags down here. And everyone said, oh, maybe 10,000 people are dead. Then what happened was the firefighters, the USAR teams were worried about running out of body bags. So they requested some from FEMA. And I think FEMA's minimum order quantity, was 10,000.

So that's what I've got like 400 in the back of my car right now. We're never going to need them, you know, which is a good thing. If I had to put a number on how many you're actually missing, I'd say probably four to 600. So I hate to ruin it for all the Alex Jones listeners and the people that think there's tens of thousands, but it's still a considerable number. You know, you're talking about hundreds of people lost their lives. Hundreds lost their lives.

There's still people missing that only the families and volunteers are looking for. And we're lucky on Tennessee side. A lot of local law enforcement there hear more about getting the job done than they do about politics. So they're helping us out a lot over there. It's a little different on the North Carolina side because of the politics and because of the politics

and because of the governor. It's not that local county guys and public safety don't want to help. That's not it at all. A lot of them are great guys. They'd love to be out there. They've got to get back to policing and putting out fires,

and the EOCs from the governor have been stood down on that, so it's not their fault. I do think that the number of 200 is a little bit conservative, just based on the amount of devastation instruction we've seen out here and the fact that there wasn't a whole lot of effort put into looking for the the many homeless camps in Asheville and sworn-noa you know there's a lot of people that we got out there that we've put in a hot tints that were homeless before the flood

that woke up the next day and half their friends were gone and no one reported those people missing okay I'm saying it's still the issue with the homeless encampments and stuff. I know there were several on the side of the pigeon. Things like that out there that they're just gone. No one knows if they're still alive or any of that. No one knows if the professionals that were going out there to try and warn people and get them move to evacuate. No one knows if they actually got down into those homeless encampments. or if they just let them wash away,

or there's still a lot of questions. Some people got an hour to evacuate. Some people got three minutes. Yeah, I know down in some of the smaller communities on the Pigeon River that maybe just two guys came through and tried to tell people y'all should leave, and then no one's going to listen to that. They didn't tell them that, you know, this is what's coming.

We also didn't know 100% what was coming. where the dams had been at flood level for two days before the actual flooding happened, and they didn't release any of that. So on Friday, you had probably trillions of gallons of water come rip-orne down those rivers. Poggy Road, I know, had like a 65-foot wall water came down, it just channelized. There's a picture I've got, but it doesn't do it justice. You have to see it to really get the scope and scale. of it. An 80-foot-high bridge just got ripped out and floated down the river by a 65-foot wall of water.

In one area outside Burnsville, then we're searching for some folks. Seven people got swept out. They had minutes of warning probably, and they had no idea it was coming. They didn't know a 40-foot wall, a water was coming their way. and they had runoff coming down the mountain behind them in one direction and then a wall of water the other direction so they had nowhere to go there was no time to react either you were lucky or you weren't and most people got lucky and some didn't there's some pretty heartbreaking stories out there in that area

because they lost so many people in such a small community a couple of which still haven't been found where entire families got swept down the river while everyone had to watch. And, you know, I was going around with a family member collecting witness videos so that we could use frame by frame rate to estimate the water velocity

so that we could try to narrow the search corridor using some mathematics of what we're doing. And those videos were tough to watch, real tough. So one of the old guys that had him on his phone, He's like, you know, I've been waiting for you to show up to come see me. I said, and he had seen him his phone. And he just broke down crying. He couldn't even watch it again because he's like, you know,

these people getting swept out and screaming for me to come help him. And I couldn't because I would have drowned too. And we've seen a lot of that out there. How bad has it started freezing up there yet? Has it started getting to the water start I sent up yet? Up in Spruce Pine, and there is a higher elevation. It definitely has. We've had snow a few times.

over the last couple weeks. So the need for getting people into somewhere warm is very urgent right now. It's critical. All these reporters keep coming out and talking to us. We've been interviewed by TV stations numerous times about hot tents. And it builds awareness, but it doesn't seem to produce any resources. It doesn't seem to change the situation on the ground as far as

hot tents getting donated or funding. coming in or manpower with volunteers coming in. So, you know, we're getting close to January. It's going to get even colder than it already is. There's already been people that have died a hypothermia out here in the last few weeks. And we've got a waiting list right now, people waiting on us to come out there and set up a hot tent for them. So we're getting them as fast as we can and we're getting out there as quick as we can to get them set up. but, you know, there's eight of us and there's hundreds of these people.

A lot of other groups are trying to help us out, but it doesn't seem like the urgency of the situation is understood by anyone outside the affected area. On that note, what can, if somebody wanted to, like, buy a few of these yurts and send them to you, obviously we don't want to give the address out on the air and everything. I mean, I have the address that we sent the raft to. Would you be able to get me exactly what you would need so we could possibly get some more ordered and get them sent up there? Is that something you'd want right now?

Yeah, and I'll get you an updated address for shipping to a staging area that we have. It's kind of more centralized because we're having to go between East Tennessee and all the way down to the south end of West North Carolina. We don't care where they are. We don't care whether they were almost before the flood, after the flood. The only stipulation that we have is that maybe a human being is cold. No matter how far away we've got to drive, we'll get out there. A lot of well-meaning people from out of state started donating the wrong hot tents. So we're actually having to inventory all of those and figure out what we're going to do with them.

So I'll shoot you the information for the right one and the address to ship them to. That would be a huge help. We picked this one specifically because not only is it big enough for a whole family and not always actually capable of keeping them warm in the higher elevations up here in the mountains, but also because it's safe. you know, it's, the manufacturer has been making these for a while, so they're not going to burn the occupants down. Some of the tents that people have sent us are some TEMU brand knockoffs of the tent that we have, and we can't use them because I wouldn't feel safe putting a family

in it. If I wouldn't want my kids in it, I'm not going to put someone else's in it. And I was saying those yurts, I've actually camped in, camped in those before in the middle of winter and they do heat up and they do I understand why you're using them because if they're good if they're a good quality they will keep people warm yeah they get toasty i actually stayed in one a couple of the nights and uh while it was snowing pretty hard here really cold and i was warm the entire night you know a lot of these people out here we've been giving them buddy heaters running on propane are only good for a few hours and then they're cold again. These yurts are the easiest solution that actually works and all we got to do is

supplying with firewood and, you know, there's an abundance of that right now. We're surrounded by it. There's mountains of it in every direction. Anything involving propane and kerosene is not sustainable. We can't run every single family propane every day forever, but we can keep sending dump truck loads of firewood to every community and make sure they have plenty of that. That's great. How many would you? you say you need right now as far as yours go say at least 18 that's just to knock through the rest of our waiting list on top of the few that we're picking up tomorrow all right well if you get me the address if you get me that address for the staging area and everything when I release this I'll

also put out to my mailing list uh information about that and um try to get people to you know if I give them that address privately they can have it sent directly there. If I need to take donations for it myself in order to send them, I'll do that too. So I'll do whatever I can to make sure, because, yeah,

I mean, I live in Alabama, and it's already getting cold at night, so I can just imagine what it's like there. Same here, man. I live in Enterprise. But, but, I mean, I really really don't know, don't know much

more to talk about what's to talk about unless you guys have anything on your mind that you want to express. I just think it's it's astounding to me because I mean I live down by the Gulf coasts. I'm used to hurricanes slamming to my backyard every season and I know what the response looks like down there. We're prepared for it happens every year. The cities down they're essentially designed to drain quickly so the water recedes. And the logistics is much simpler down there. You're not in the mountains. You're not the haulers.

It doesn't get cold. There's plenty of roads in. It's on flat land. Up here is definitely a test, a stress test of our ability to be able to react and help each other in a time of crisis without very much government intervention, or at least not with very efficient government intervention. it's astounding to me though to be 12 weeks out and to have so many families having to look for their dead relatives by themselves no resources being committed to this whatsoever they're just out there looking on their own and uh you know one of the family members we work with kelly she's doing what she calls redneck math where she's calculating

where her cousin might be based on width of the river and depth of the river at the time that her cousin was swept out and water velocity and the mass, you know, the weight of the person and plotting on a map with me where all the other people were found and then plugging that into AI

and doing a bunch of math. And we showed that to emergency management. They were really impressed. They're like, wow, you've been quantifying the search area with, you know, we're talking like geospatial and geotechnical engineering and hydrology stuff that's way out of my wheelhouse and she's having to do this all by herself she's having to take off days off of work every day to go meet with emergency management with me and go out and talk to local law enforcement and go do site surveys of areas for us to search and it's strange to me like why is she having to do this as her second full-time job why is there no resources

Now, it's great when we go on the Tennessee side. There's some law enforcement partners and a USAR team and emergency management that are outstanding. You know, they go above and beyond to help us out. But in other areas, she's just out there doing this on her own and so are these other families. And there's plenty of families that we're not helping that we don't have enough resources for that, you know, they are having to rebuild their house, more than their lost loved ones, work a full-time job. And then around that, they have to go look for their missing relative on their own. I've never seen anything like it before. Well, I mean, I just, I can't tell you how much I appreciate what you guys are doing.

And, you know, allowing our guys like Mellon and everything's come out there and help you. And, you know, I know that he's, he can't say enough nice things about you guys. and, you know, he's, he's part of a fraternity that, you know, we're all part of a fraternity, and he's, thank you, thank you for allowing, allowing us to help. And, you know, if there's any other way, like I said, well, I'll do as much as I can to get you more tense. And hopefully this will, if you need more, if you need more hands up there, might be able to, might be able to pull that off too. So, yeah, I mean, I just don't know what else to say at this point. I knew when this happened, knowing what the political climate's been like for, you know, the past four years that you're all going to be on your own.

And that, you know, Americans, we're going to, real Americans, we're going to have to do this for ourselves. Yeah, kind of seems like it. Yeah, well, you know, it's just neighbors of the neighbors. if the situation was reversed, they would do the same for us. I'm confident in that based on the great people I've met out here. And Mellon's been awesome. I can't speak highly enough of him. And all the guys with OGC that have been out here helping us,

every single one of them has been outstanding. A huge asset out here to us, to the community, to local public safety and government. I know a couple of the OGC guys basically coordinated the entire town by themselves with a couple of laptops out of the visitors center in Black Mountain and got all the organizations tied in talking to each other probably saved a lot of lives, to be honest. A lot of the things happening out here,

we wouldn't be where we're at without guys like Mellon. So I know like we're doing the shiny cool guy stuff, which fizzles out quickly and doesn't last, but stuff like what, he's been doing supporting us has a huge impact is why we've been able to stay out here

for so long and it's guys like you, Pete, and your audience and you getting us a raft that wasn't salvaged out of the trash. That thing held up

phenomenally patched and pulled out of the trash over rivers that are filled with debris and that have had the railroads pushed into them by CSX. But we were pushing it beyond the capacity

what it was designed for. Yeah. So that raft, you got us, that's actually for the job that we're doing. That was huge. So we really appreciate that. And we appreciate everything Melon's been doing out here for us. And all the guys from Old Glory Club, they've been a huge help to us. Well, we're going to keep trying.

And like I said, when we sign off, get me that information. And, you know, we'll see about getting those tents up there. I'll see. We'll try to pull off some magic. get that up. It would be awesome. Yeah, that'd be outstanding. Thank you, man. Yeah, we don't want a bunch of money. We just want hot tits.

We're appreciative to get a raft that is safe, and that's all we really needed. Everyone in here is already in the hole in their bank account. We're not worried about that. We just want to make sure to keep everyone warm. All right. Well, I'm going to sign off. Don't disconnect, because I can get that information from you. but thank you and thanks for talking to us. Thanks for talking to us.

We really appreciate it. Thanks for having us on. We appreciate you, man.